Selling farmans and castrating children to pay tax: A picture of the Mughal wreckage of India’s economy

Clearly, when productive resources and precious human talent is squandered away in the reckless Mughal fashion for generations, its most visible impact is on the economy. The unquenchable thirst of the Mughal emperors for indulging in personal luxuries on this epic scale (as described in the previous part of this series) had to obviously be financed by their citizens. It is one thing to enjoy the luxury that ensues as a fruit of stimulating the economy, but historical evidence shows that the Mughals paid almost no heed to this fundamental principle of political economy. On the contrary, their extortionate taxation grew proportionately with their limitless craving for material acquisitions, sensual enjoyment and self-aggrandisement. We can consider another consequence of this economic misrule of Akbar “the great” (sic).

“… [The] ordinary village labourer…as a serf…had a little…more than the bare minimum necessary for his subsistence. In unfavourable seasons his position was very much worse…he had the choice between the certainty of starvation at home and the probability of starvation on the roadside or in the jungle… there is no…systematic attempt to keep villages going…and when the stock of food was exhausted there was nothing for it but to take to the roads or the jungles, and, to sell off the children as the last realisable asset.” (Emphasis added)

In Shah Jahan’s time, the sale of children by their own parents had been transformed into a grisly social and economic phenomenon. It had birthed what can only be called the castration industry, a flourishing enterprise that was pervasive in Bengal. Parents of male children would castrate their boys and sell them off to pimps and slave traders in order to pay tax. These child-eunuchs would then be employed in various Zenanas — of the Mughal emperor himself or that of his governors and officials. They were provided with food and bare essentials and a paltry salary. Some even received no salary: they were supposed to convince themselves that gratitude for this degrading “employment” was preferable to salary.

The following are some job titles that are mirrors to the abyss that the Mughals had thrown India into: spittoon-bearer, cup-bearer, umbrella-bearer, ice-carrier, servants specially appointed to serve a specific delicacy, huge retinues of people employed for hunting, hawking, pigeon-flying, trainers who trained the fighting instincts of cocks, rams, frogs and even spiders, and servants whose only job was to drive away flies that threatened to approach the fair face of the sultan or aristocrat. There is no escaping the conclusion that the Mughal employment market was essentially a slave market. 

However, this ghastly portrait of the pitiless economic ruin of India was not unique to the Mughal empire alone. It was rather the continuation of the same venal tradition that was introduced in India since the time of the so-called Delhi sultanate. But it has to be explicitly mentioned for two reasons. One, because the Mughal dominion covered a much vaster territory and lasted for nearly two centuries. Two, to expose the myth of the alleged “glory” of the Mughal rule and the fraudulent paeans eulogising its “splendid prosperity”.

In fact, a comprehensive study of how the Mughal Empire impoverished India’s economy awaits the studious researcher.

The Mughal economic vandalism also had a seamy political side. The flagrant scale of wild spending financed by blood-sucking taxation could obviously not be sustained for long. In fact, even the little good that Akbar had done was prolifically squandered away almost immediately by his debauched son, Jahangir. He outsourced the entire administration to his crafty wife Nur Jahan and her Rasputinesque brother, Asaf Khan. In fact, Muslim chronicles and European travelogues and memoirs give elaborate and precise details of how the siblings wrecked the economy.

This downward spiral reached its apogee in Aurangzeb’s time when he pretty much exhausted his treasury by waging senseless wars and embarked on industrial scale persecution of Hindus. Indeed, by then, the Mughal naval power had become a joke. It is this vacuum that Shivaji filled by building up a formidable navy along the western coast even as Aurangzeb’s corrupt officials were busy selling Farmans to European traders.

In fact, by 1700, Aurangzeb had lost effective control over the economy and administration of three important port cities: Calcutta (or Bengal in general), Machilipatnam and Surat — i.e., on both the eastern and western coasts. His officials paid him the customary respect, exhibited the requisite fear and deposited revenue. But within their own domains, they were despots in their own right. Europeans had also steadily grown in power, leading to frequent outbreaks of violence with the local population. In several instances, Aurangzeb’s Muslim governors would accept bribes in the form of money and liquor and women from Europeans to “settle” these clashes.

This is how Leo Amery, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, describes the situation: “[This] is a picture of the Mughal Empire on the eve of its dissolution, still apparently intact, but showing everywhere the cracks and fissures which were soon to bring the whole fabric tumbling down in wreckage. We see the aged…Aurangzib in his camp, with his immediate entourage of self-seeking, venal, luxury-loving and incompetent ministers, in the midst of a vast army, utterly worthless from the fighting point of view… besieging Maratha forts only to be reoccupied as soon as the Army has marched on elsewhere. Meanwhile the fabric of government, sustained only by an endless stream of Imperial letters and by the services of some 4,000 spies, becomes weaker everywhere. An alien government in the hands of Turks and Persians, with Persian as its official language, it has lost the hold…over the Hindu population as the result of Aurangzib’s fanatical persecution of the Hindu religion and extrusion of the Hindus from all positions of responsibility. The facade is still there and actually covers a wider area of India than ever before, but end is near… A bare fifty years will separate the death of Aurangzib from Clive’s victory at Plassey.” (Emphasis added)

Clearly, this is one of the most lucid assessments of the alien Mughal rule given by an Englishman.

This brings us back to where we started this essay series: that the Mughal Empire, for all its pretensions of being an Indian empire, was actually an empire of individual Islamic despots who neither cared for the political independence nor the territorial integrity of India. But from the Islamic doctrinal perspective, it was rather consistent because Islam recognises no geographical borders.

This among other factors was how the Mughals smoothed the way for the piece-by-piece conquest of India by the East India Company.

(Series Concluded)

The author is the Founder and Chief Editor at The Dharma Dispatch. Views are personal.

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